Conventional umbrellas are known to keep users dry during rainfall. They are notorious for being damaged easily by environmental elements in addition to being cumbersome to deploy and retract. These drawbacks make the conventional umbrella less suited for the variety of situations where its ability to protect a user from environmental elements would be beneficial. There are known umbrellas that are motorized to reduce the manual labor involved, but these umbrellas tend to suffer from additional problems such as interference with objects when opening and closing, relatively high complexity, inadequate stability, lack of modularity, lack of portability and lack of versatility.